Motorola’s 2021 phone strategy doesn’t make much sense, but it will still win

Android enthusiasts have a long and historic love / hate affair with Motorola. In the beginning, Motorola launched very weak phones with complicated changes to Android (remember MotoBLUR?) That transformed the company into what appeared to be a subsidiary of Verizon Wireless in the United States.

So Google came in and bought the important bits that make up a Motorola phone and we love the company. Phones like the Moto X looked great, had great hardware (for the time) and were quick to get important updates and features because Google was basically in control. That’s the exact recipe for success if you want to cater to the hardcore Android audience, and it worked.

Apparently, Google didn’t like to own the Moto brand as much as we loved Google to own the Moto brand. Welcome to the Lenovo era, also known as Motonovo or Lenoverola. Now, we really don’t know what to think because Moto makes some of the best cheap phones, but it is also so random with its phone launches in the USA.

Take one of the new phones that Motorola announced yesterday: the Motorola One 5G Ace (sorry, but I love that name) and its Snapdragon 750G, huge battery and inevitably horrible camera. It’s a 5G phone that doesn’t have support for mmWave (at least until Verizon releases its own version) and costs $ 400.

This is not a bad thing. The 750G will perform as well as the 765G for all intents and purposes, there is 6 GB of memory and 128 GB of storage and, unless you really need a decent camera, it is a good phone compared to the Pixel 4a if you want something with a larger 6.7 inch screen. Too bad it will come with Android 10 and will only have an update because Motorola does not think you deserve two.

At the other end of the spectrum is the Moto G Play. Its list price is $ 169 and you are getting exactly what you think a $ 169 phone would be: Snapdragon 460, 3 GB of memory and a 6.5 inch low resolution (1600×720) screen. But you also get a gigantic 5,000 mAh battery and a price tag of $ 169.

These two phones are apparently the best that Motorola can offer in 2021. Both are budget models, with Ace being the top of the budget and G Play being the last, and Motorola could sell enough to make a splash, especially with any operator support. If any of them came with the promise of timely security patches and came with Android 11, I would probably feel good about recommending them.

But Motorola has also launched two other phones that are just clones of the 2020 offerings, only worse. The Moto G Stylus and Moto G Power have nothing to indicate that they are using a model a year younger than the last Moto G Stylus and Moto G Power, which includes the software. Both come with Android 10 and a promise of an update to Android 11 sometime in the future, just as the 2020 versions did. They both look the same. They use different chips, but the performance compared to the 2020 models will be very similar.

There was no need to do that and Motorola could simply have continued to sell the 2020 models to the few people who care about buying one of these two phones. It is possible that Qualcomm moved the needle and does not really build the “older” chipsets, but that is just a guess. My other guess – and the one I feel most confident in – is that Motorola did it because it can and only Android enthusiasts will notice.

Motorola has become complacent in a category it owns.

No matter what’s going on at Motorola’s offices – I like to imagine an oversized broom cupboard inside Lenovo’s gigantic 100-story megacorp center in the dark – it really doesn’t seem like anyone cares. To which I say someone needs care.

Motorola has almost no competition in this space. Nokia and LG try to compete, but let’s face it – no one is buying these phones at any number worth counting. OnePlus is trying to enter the market, but started off badly, offering two models with confusing names and little differentiation for normal consumers. So, for now, this is Moto’s home. They have it.

I think that made the company complacent. Whatever is released does not matter because the only real competition is between their own models. This is great for the financial results of Motorola and Lenovo, but it is really bad for consumers. Motorola needs to do something here because a cheap but better phone from Samsung or LG or even Google can take up space and quickly.